Cloud News: NAS as a service

Listened to an interesting edition of the Cloud Computing Show about storage in the cloud. Not storage that is accessed through a proprietary API such as Amazon S3, RackSpace CloudFiles or the new EMC Atmos Online Storage Server. But NAS, with direct NFS and CIFS access to large volumes of data storage in the cloud! Some sort of NetApp, but in the cloud with multi-tenancy support. The (interesting) people interviewed were from a company called Zetta. I had never heard about "NAS in the cloud" nor Zetta. Zetta is a new player with an interesting offering that even allows to integrate with a corporate LDAP.

There seem to be more "NAS in the cloud" offerings, e.g. Nirvanix. And also IBM is starting to have a public cloud offering, including storage: IBM is IBM is entering the game with Smart Business Storage Cloud.

Note: direct access to GoGrid Cloud Storage seems possible as well, but is still a bit unclear to me

The brower model is broken

I'm not a security specialist, but I find IT security a very interesting topic. As a longtime listener of the Security Now podcast, I listened to another interesting story: "The Broken Browser Model". The talk was inspired on a presentation given at the Black Hat conference.

Main message of the podcast is the insecurity when a mix of HTTP and HTTPS is used. The HTML coming in over an insecure connection can be manipulated by a "man-in-the-middle" (e.g. through ARP spoofing), turning all the https:// URL (and more) into standard insecure http://. The man-in-the-middle initiates the SSL connections and can sniff all information going over the connection. A 24hr test of a (unknown) public hotspot revealed passwords for Yahoo, Gmail, Paypal and more, without any of the users noticing anything.

Devoxx 09 - Great talks

The Devoxx conference is the place to be for everyone interested in Java and related techologies. And as one of the members of the steering team, I'm proud (again) on the impressive list of speakers we've gathered. My personal focus and interest is SOA and Cloud Computing. And that will definitely be covered at Devoxx!

University Day 1 - Monday Nov 16
The Cambrian Cloud Computing Explosion - John M Willis
Got to know John though his podcasts. John has a strong background in systems management and Tivoli, but his current focus is Cloud. And rest assured that he knows what a cloud is and knows all the players. For all the could enthusiastics: strongly recommended!
jBPM in Action - Tom Baeyens
Tom is "mister jBPM", the main driver behind jBPM, the JBoss BPM offering.
Architecting Robust Applications for Amazon EC2 - Chris Richardson
Chris is the founder of CloudFoundry. CloudFoundry provides tooling (and more) to deploy Java applications on Amazon EC2.
Note: CloudFoundry got acquired by SpringSource and SpringSource in turn got acquired by VMWare. Which is interesting as Amazon and VMWare are seen as big competing players in the cloud space.
SOA, OpenESB and OpenSSO Programming with Passion! - Sang Shin
Talk will be based on Sang's free online SOA course material.

University Day 2 - Tuesday Nov 16
Google App Engine for Java - a real live voyage to The Cloud
Develop along with the speakers your first (or next) application on the Google App Engine. No sales pitch, as the speakers are - Sam Brodkin and Scott Stevenson - are independent(s).
SOA In Practice - Nicolai Josuttis
Nicolas is the author of the book "SOA in practice". One of the better SOA books in my opinion.

Conference Day 1 - Wednesday Nov 17
ESB's and WebServices in Practice - Nicolai Josuttis
Once more Nicolas, but now with a more focused talk on the use of ESB's.
Architecting Robust Applications for Amazon EC2 - Chris Richardson
A condensed version of the University talk.
jBPM4 in Action - Tom Baeyens
A shortened version, ideal if you went to the cloud talk of John Willis on Monday.
Keeping Your Options Open, Even if the Cloud is Not - Doug Tidwell
Another specialist wrt. XSLT 2.0, but that's not the topic of this session. Doug will rather talk about the different Cloud offerings and standardization in the cloud space.
Distributed Programming the Google Way - Gregor Hohpe
Gregor is famous for his Integration Patterns. Focus of this talk are the base technologies underlying the Google imperium and the Google cloud solutions.

Conference Day 2 - Thrusday Nov 18
Using XML with Java: Spoilt for Choice? - Michael Kay
Michael Kay is the author of the Saxon XSLT and XQuery processor. Michael is "Mr XSLT". XML remains an important aspect of SOA and general (Java) development.
Note: actually we have 2nd XSLT guru at Devoxx, Doug Tidwell
Google Appengine Java: Groovy baby! - Patrick Chanezon and Guillaume Laforge
Another perspective on the Google AppEngine with focus on running different JVM based languages on Google AppEngine.
Master Data Management - Pierre Bonnet
Master Data Mangement is another important aspect of a SOA. Speaker is Pierre Bonnet, founder of the MDM Alliance Group.

Conference Day 3 - Friday Nov 19
BPM in a SOA Environment - Paul Brown
Paul Brown is the author of 2 great SOA books, is an architect at Tibco, but most importantly he is a senior, mild and fluent speaker on SOA. For this Devoxx talk, we have asked Paul to focus on BPM. Recommended!
Open Source SOA with Fuse - James Strachan
James is involved in a tremendous number of open source projects, usually focused on SOA and integraton, with ActiveMQ and ServiceMix being the most well known. Will be interesting to learn about the status of Fuse, the ESB based on ServiceMix.
Note: in particular as Progress acquired Iona and is behind FuseSource
Note 2: for those who remember the CXF WS framework, that's part of Fuse

See you at Devoxx!